If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too:
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or, being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or being hated don’t give way to hating,
And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise;

The Albanian Leviathan is a sardine. The sitting rooms where men gather are tins of sardines. Truth, in order to find space there, has to be folded in two and then folded again.
In a country as small as this, so small that you could easily draw it on a one-to-one scale on this packet of cigarettes, you don’t know where and how to sit or support yourself: on the throat of your neighbour, or on the buttocks of the other fellow’s wife.
Seated, huddled around the coffee table, how can you greet anyone without jabbing someone else with your elbow? How can you pay a compliment without deafening someone?
We can see one another in our spoons, and we are warped.